To die a horrific death, in disgrace, betrayed by your people and your—
The screen suddenly blanked. The bedroom lights came on.
Cecily's eyes opened. She blinked.
"Message," said a synthetic voice.
The screen flashed again and text appeared. The voice began reading. But Cecily knew who it was from. Had to be; there was only one person who could rate a priority high enough to interrupt Robespierre and the French Revolution.
She got up. The lights brightened. Cecily Sunday was 36 years old; she was a small-boned woman, petite, pale, with shoulder-length auburn hair. Her movements were languid, as if she were actually making that last walk.
Just outside, in the office room of her apartment, Cecily could hear the printer working.
So. Kraig Drennan had sent some notes. She went to the printer and gathered the papers, glancing at them quickly. She started to put them down, then looked again, more closely.
Returning to her bedroom with the papers, she called up the map function of her computer and requested Medburg. She zoomed and shifted the view.
Then she smiled. Cecily Sunday had a weird smile. It was like a grimace, and people who didn't know her usually saw it with a sense of trepidation, as if they were seeing someone in pain.
This one could be easy, thought Cecily. And if she was right she could show up Kraig a little. Just a little, that's all she wanted.
She smiled again. All the more reason to be merry.
Bethesda, Maryland / 3:10 p.m.
From her glass cubicle Lisa Murdoch watched the petite auburn-haired woman glide through the office area. She'd noticed before how Cecily seemed to glide when she walked. Weird. From her days as a high-stepper and baton-twirler in the high school marching band, Lisa knew that most people bobbed up and down when they walked, but Cecily Sunday had a gait like a ghost.
Lisa put on a headset that was plugged into her computer. The screen showed Kraig Drennan's office, from the vantage point of a corner above and behind Kraig's desk. Kraig's head was in the foreground, and Lisa was surprised to see that he had a tiny, incipient bald spot. Lisa hadn't noticed it before because Kraig was much taller than she was. She grinned. Probably an ulcer working away at his innards too. Well, that was the life of the boss, wasn't it? At least an ambitious one like Kraig Drennan. To Lisa it seemed like he had a chip on his shoulder. Everybody knew where he came from, about his mother being in jail when he was born. Born behind bars!
In the center of the image were the Spartan chairs in front of Kraig's desk. Other offices had space-age contour chairs, made with some sort of hard plastic; they were ergonomically designed, it seemed, to enforce the designer's notion of good posture. The chairs in Kraig's office were straight-backed, made of wood, and had two spindly arms and a thin bit of padding on the seat and back. The person he was interviewing would be directly in the hidden cam's view.
After a few seconds passed, Cecily Sunday was sitting in one of the chairs.
Lisa didn't feel any remorse for spying on the boss. What good was all that high-tech equipment if she and some of the other bold members of the staff didn't put the cameras and microphones to some kind of good use?
* * *
Cecily had walked in without knocking. Kraig was intently reading something on his monitor and didn't immediately look up.
"I solved the case," said Cecily.
Kraig's eyebrows shot up. "You did?"
"Yeah. Man, it was simple." Cecily was smiling that grimacing smile. Her teeth were all still there, but not in great shape. The front ones were slightly discolored—pale ochre—and a few of the lower ones were crooked.
"So fill me in," he said.
"All you've got to do is find the most likely suspect," said Cecily, hooking one slender leg over an arm of the chair. She was so small that she fit into the seat with plenty of room to spare. "Find the most likely route of transmission, and trace it back to the most likely source."
Kraig shifted in his chair, his face showing discomfort.
"I'm telling you this," said Cecily, "because you're just a desk jockey who doesn't know crap about real micro work."
The office flooded with cyan light.
Cecily laughed. "I knew I could do it!"
Kraig's jaw muscles started working double time. In a few seconds the cyan lights died. "Okay," he said, sighing. "You've had your joke. I was prepared for something like that. You didn't get very far."
"Too true. I was hoping to make it all the way to the reef. Where did you learn how to dive, anyway?"
"I'd always wanted to learn but never got a chance until I started earning some money." Kraig's voice took on an edge. "Can we talk about the case now?"
"Come on, Kraig. Lighten up. Everybody knows you're after the director's job. It's the most transparent thing in this whole office building, including the partitions out there in cube city."
Kraig appeared to struggle for control again.
Cecily grinned. "We'll be seeing cyan again in a second?"
With white, compressed lips, Kraig said, "Nope."
"That's too bad, because cyan is one of my favorite colors too. By the way, why are you having that Lisa girl spy on me?"
Kraig gave her a look of surprise.
Cecily shook her head. "Man, I should get really pissed at you guys."
"She's not spying on you."
"Oh, yeah? Is that right? That means she's spying on you."
"She's not—"
"Yeah she is. She kept staring at me through that glass partition—did she think I wouldn't notice? Then just before I walked into your office she slipped a headset over her ears. I'd noticed that headset as I walked past her cubicle, and it wasn't connected to the computer. And that got me thinking about what sort of device it was hooked into. She probably hid one of those little audiovisual communication things in your office somewhere. She wouldn't have had any trouble finding one—didn't Chet Vernolt order about a million of them?"
Kraig thought a moment. With all that equipment lying around, it was possible. If Lisa was spying on him then he'd have to confront her, but he realized he had made a mistake too. "I assigned her to the case," he told Cecily. "I should have invited her to this meeting."
"Good, Kraig. You're a good boss, you take the blame when your employees do something stupid." Cecily raised her voice. "I'm not like Kraig. Hear that, Lisa? If you're going to be my partner then that's the first thing you ought to learn."
Kraig walked to the door and leaned out. Through the transparent cubicle partitions he saw Lisa dictating something to her computer. She looked guilty as hell.
Well, reasoned Kraig, we spy on them too, don't we? Why else did Chet have glass partitions installed instead of opaque ones?
He waved, got her attention, and then beckoned with a finger. She bounced toward him and said in a perky voice, "What's up?"
"When I asked you to keep an eye on Cecily, that's not what I meant."
Lisa attempted an innocent stare.
"If I look around my office," said Kraig evenly, "will I find something I shouldn't?"
"It's in the paneling above your desk. I stood on your chair to install it. I guess I overstepped my bounds. I'm sorry."
She looked sorry, thought Kraig, but maybe that was just because she got caught. Yet he couldn't work up much anger, and not merely because he feared Chet's physio alarms. Bounds overstepping had worked itself into the culture here.
Part of it was the nature of the job. Whereas the CDC went around all goody-goody like Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer—"We're the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and we're your friends"—the Micro-Investigation Unit's broader scope included dealing with all kinds of potential terrorist threats. When tackling deliberate acts of unthinkable violence and devastation, even when such senseless terrorism was merely a remote possibility, the temperament of investigators tended to be a little less than saintly. And with the authority vested in a government agency responsible for n
ational security, boundaries sometimes got fuzzy.
Another part of the problem was Chet Vernolt. But that, figured Kraig, was nothing that a new director couldn't fix.
"You still want to work on this case?" Kraig hitched his thumb toward his office. "With her?"
Lisa hesitated.
"You'll learn something," said Kraig. "Maybe a lot of things. A sign of a good worker is someone who can work with all kinds of people."
Lisa took a deep breath and stepped inside the office. Kraig followed her. Lisa nodded stiffly at Cecily and sat with obvious distress in the chair beside her. Cecily glanced up and smiled an even more gruesome smile than usual.
When Kraig sat down beside his desk, Cecily said, "Let's move on to the good news."
"The good news?"
"The bad guys. The good news about the bad guys. I found them. You heard me earlier?"
"I thought you were kidding."
"No way. This was easy. There's a little creek that flows through that area of Medburg. Moshatowie Creek. It also flows through a more well-to-do part of the state, which is upstream from Medburg."
Kraig leaned back. Flowing water was a splendid route of transmission. Or a terrifying one, depending on how you looked at it. "Who?"
"Little place called Vision Cell Bioceuticals. Two-man start-up company, launched five years ago. They have 40 employees now."
Kraig sighed. "Two-person start-up, Cecily. Please. While you're under contract with the government you represent the government, and you have to use the appropriate language—"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. The point is, their lab is in the next county, right on the creek. Nobody else is on that creek, no other biologicals, no chemicals, no high-tech. Everything else looks pretty benign. I suspect that whatever happened, it's accidental. Hard to believe it's deliberate. Why would terrorists pick a place like Medburg?"
"Who says it's the creek?"
"It's the place to start looking," said Cecily.
Kraig rubbed his jaw. "There's one little problem with your theory." He flipped around the screen that was perched on his desk. "When you came in I was reading the M.E.'s report on the two bodies."
Cecily squinted at the screen. She leaned forward. "Cause of death...unknown? What kind of report is that?"
"The honest kind. The kind that says it's not known."
"Wasn't there a problem with the bodies? The morgue got hold of them first?"
Kraig nodded. "The report is provisional, but I goosed them a little, and sent a couple of our techs up there. I think the data are pretty clean, at least for the major stuff. It doesn't say much, but what it doesn't say is pretty good news. I was afraid it was going to turn out to be influenza or some related virus."
Cecily shook her head.
"I know," said Kraig quickly. "That kind of bug doesn't exactly sneak up on you, and with all the physicians and hospitals looking out for new and unusual cases, you'd think we'd get early warning before bodies started dropping on the street. But it's possible to have a fast-acting strain."
"Okay, I see your point. But why are you ruling out Vision Cell?"
"I'm not ruling out anything. Just read the report, Cecily. If it's something from that company, I would think it'd be biological. But there were no signs of infection in the bodies."
Cecily stared. "No inflammation? No surge in antibodies?"
"Nothing. All the little bugs found so far were the usual species and strains that inhabit the human body. Nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing that the victims' immune systems seemed to be worried about. Pathologists are currently doing more sensitive tests on the tissues, but that's the way it looks now." Kraig rubbed his jaw again. "I don't know. Chet and I were talking earlier, and he seems to think it's something they ate. Some sort of chemical that got in their food, probably at the same restaurant or diner. CDC sent some of their people from Atlanta and they're checking out that angle. Maybe Chet's right. Maybe it's something bizarre, like an accidental substitution of sodium nitrate for sodium chloride. That's happened before, you know."
Cecily shrugged. "Could be. If we're lucky."
"First thing I want you to do is to find out all you can about the victims. Who they were, where they went, what they did, everything."
"Kraig, that's the thing CDC's sure to do. Isn't it kind of a waste of time for us to do the same thing?"
Kraig shook his head.
"I know, I know," said Cecily. "They're too innocent."
"You can dig deeper," said Kraig. "Get your hands dirty."
"Who's going to be the lab guy on this case?"
"Roderick Halkin."
Cecily frowned. "Man, oh man. You really got it in for me. Sherlock? Why'd you give me Sherlock again?"
"Because you two work well together."
Cecily stood up. Suddenly she looked tired. In a low voice she said, "He's the only one who'll work with me. Isn't he?"
Kraig simply looked at her, saying nothing.
Cecily smiled as she walked toward the door. "Come on, Lisa. Let's get to work."
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania / 3:30 p.m.
When Gordon Norschalk reached his office the alarm was screaming an alert.
Frowning, he shut it off by hitting the escape key on his computer. He plopped into a plush chair behind his desk and wearily rubbed his forehead.
The experiments hadn't given the expected results. They never do, of course, not in exactly the way you'd hoped they would. But after eight hours in the lab, you'd like to have something a little better to show for your efforts than a bunch of data that were difficult at best to interpret. And at worse, he'd just wasted a whole day.
Gordon took off his eyeglasses. The close-up work—poring over electron micrographs—had been killing his eyes and he badly needed touch-up surgery for his vision again. But he hadn't had the time to go in. It was an outpatient procedure but it would kill off an entire afternoon and he couldn't afford to lose that much time.
I'm only forty-one, he thought. Am I already getting burned out?
Realizing that he should be hungry—he hadn't stopped for lunch—Gordon slid his chair toward the refrigerator. The sensors detected the movement and the computer's speakers started screaming again.
Gordon sighed. What now? What else could go wrong? He removed a ham sandwich from the refrigerator and tapped a key on the computer keyboard.
A picture flashed on the large LCD screen, which was hanging over the desk. A synthetic voice began reading some text. Gordon unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, scarcely listening.
Then he heard something about two bodies in Medburg. He glanced up, saw the screen. In a corner inset was a map, showing the location of the bodies.
Suddenly Gordon felt even older.
* * *
The boss's office was on the second floor. Gordon knocked twice on the door and then cracked it open.
Burnett Sellás, CEO of Vision Cell Bioceuticals, looked up.
Jeez, thought Gordon. He looks as tired as I feel.
"What is it, Gordie?"
Gordon walked in, eying the CEO, who also happened to be an old friend. Burnett, a man whose determination and intelligence had gotten him into this country and then into big-money science, was now showing his age. The formerly black and glossy hair was graying, the dark skin was wrinkled. And he was only a few years older than Gordon. Gordon, whose hair had prematurely turned white years ago but whose cherubic Nordic features were still youthful, smiled a greeting even though he didn't feel up to it.
"There might be some trouble in Medburg," he said softly. He sat down on a comfortable, castered chair. Burnett didn't skimp when it came to the people who worked for him; the chairs for the visitors in his office were almost as nice as the one he used himself.
"What sort of trouble?"
"Two unexplained deaths."
Burnett kept staring. His bulky shoulders made a little shrug.
"They were found not far from Moshatowie Creek," added Gord
on, with a tone of apology.
"And you're afraid," said Burnett, "that it might have something to do with us?"
"I doubt it very much. But it's possible."
Burnett bit his lip. "How'd you come by the news?"
"My news software turned up the story. One of the things it's programmed to look for is any news about the company, or something that might be related to the company."
The company—the term always had an effect on Burnett. He straightened up.
Gordon went on. "And if the software made the connection...."
"Yes." Burnett nodded sadly. "People will as well. It will not take them long. Yes, it will not take them long to come here. And you know what they will be thinking."
"Does it really matter? We've got no hot labs here, we don't work with dangerous viruses. And we have nothing to hide." Gordon knew Burnett too well to make it a question. They'd started the company together, five years ago; Burnett got the nod as president and CEO because the ideas were mostly his.
"Yes, it matters," said Burnett, "even though we have nothing to hide. Not just because of the disruptions, although there will surely be plenty of those."
Gordon shrugged. "So the CDC shows up. They ask questions, poke around—"
"No, no, Gordon. It won't be that simple. The CDC I can handle. But with the deaths...two, you said? They'll be afraid. They'll be afraid of another epidemic. Other agencies will become involved. Other agents, the ones belonging to those investigative units that treat you like a bug that needs to be stepped on."
"Come on, Burnie. It won't be like that." Gordon stared at his old friend. He'd never known Burnett to exaggerate.
"That's not the worse of it." Burnett shook his head. A small amount of loose flesh from the jowls quivered. "Some of those agents could be spies."
"Spies?" Gordon choked off a laugh. Spies?
Burnett looked up. "I see you're not taking me seriously. Well, my friend, you'll find that I'm right. We may have nothing to hide but we certainly have some trade secrets that I'd hate for our competitors to get their paws on."
Gordon got a sinking feeling. The patent he'd been wanting to apply for....
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